Translation
My first challenge was translation of the Sermon into English. My work on the Sermon's sounds had persuaded me that most English translations play the Sermon false and obscure its organizational clues. I had complained of this often, even in print. But only when presented with the challenge of performance did I confront the difficulty of doing something about it. How does one preach the kingdom of heaven to a modern audience? How to communicate related concepts that Sermon associates through rhythm and rhyme, when the words for their English equivalents diverge and clash? How to convey the Sermon's many switches back and forth between the second person singular and plural? I became uneasy with the compromises I found necessary.
Memorization
Upon reflection, it surprises me now that it took a week or so for me to panic about having to memorize a three-chapter passage. At first I thought I knew the Sermon so well that memorization would happen automatically. Then I realized that I only knew the passage in Greek - not in English. Its mnemonic clues, so clear in Greek, are unavailable in English, despite my efforts to capture such signals in my translation. Sometimes - too often - a suitable word simply wasn't available. To commit the passage to memory, I found I had to visualize the passage in Greek, then recall my translation of each section. The mental effort was too slow and inefficient to support fluid delivery.
Delivery
Having settled on a translation and memorized the passage, its public delivery presented new challenges. My sustained, microscopic analysis of the Sermon's sounds had neglected the Sermon's coherence as a literary whole, and the transitions from one section to the next. Although I felt confident that I understood each of the Sermon's parts, I felt at a loss as I tried to capture the overall mood of the Sermon. Is it placid, angry, frustrated, patient, variable? Are the beatitudes consoling or sarcastic? How should the Lord's prayer sound in the middle? Is the prohibition of anxiety reassuring or testy? Is there any other way to end the Sermon than by shouting? And how does the Sermon's emotional tone modulate from one section to the next?
I did not solve any of these problems in time for my April performance. But the process introduced questions that previously I had never imagined. And my quest to answer the questions sent me back to the Sermon again, and to the first gospel as a whole, with new eyes and ears.
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